Comment by conjecTech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conjecTech | Hacker News Reader

This thesis is off. It's not as if Reddit just appeared on the internet yesterday. It's been a place people look for this kind of info for a long time, and people have been trying to game it for just as long. And it already has a good search engine - that just happens to be Google. So it still leaves the question: why does Reddit still have such a high signal-to-noise ratio.

A few things I've noticed:

1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect.

2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.

3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.

4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.

5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.

Recently have noticed a business creating fictional threads on reddit (multiple on different communities) working as an AD to sell something.

Example:

„What is the cheapest best cooling for cpu now?”

All discussions point to product that more experienced users know its crap.

But still the wrong product is at the top with most (botted) upvotes.

Companies realized that ppl look for opinions on reddit -> that created demand for those services -> bots companies implemented new strategy.

Its getting very very hard to get honest expert opinion. Seems like the only way now is to belong to specific closed communities.

Closed communities is where it's at... But they have the obvious inherent problem: they don't scale. If a closed community lets in too many people, it becomes a somewhat obscured open community, with all the downsides. And if it doesn't, well, you are unlikely to get in on a topic you are interested in.

One of the lessons of the last decade (?) is that if a community scales, subverting it also scales

That's something I've been grappling with recently, and the solution I landed on as "good enough" (though far from perfect) is to have a community where the ability to post and interact is closed, but the ability to view the content is open.

Some subreddits have tried a variation of this, such as the Economics subreddit granting a "Bureau Member" flair for individuals who have proven their knowledge of economics in long form posts, but without taking it farther than just extra flair. There's no weekly threads for Bureau Members only to post, or anything like that.

The issue then becomes how do you set up a judging body that determines the criteria for who is allowed to interact, and prevent that body from being co-opted in some way. Not an easy task, especially for a social media company where there's absolutely perverse incentives at play.

Seems like an easy thing to provide a link for?

Yeah initially I thought Reddit was useful for "give an opinion" type queries, especially where you're getting answers to a newly posted query. Eg my brother managed to get a specialist doctor to give an opinion about our mom's treatment.

But for the vast majority of commercially relevant searches, it will get sunk quite soon. It can't be terribly hard to hook up a GPT style bot to harvest karma on various accounts and then use that to gain credibility on "which headphones should I buy" type queries. You might not even need to automate it, a farm of real people could potentially be useful for that, I bet that's offered by someone out there already.

> It can't be terribly hard to hook up a GPT style bot to harvest karma on various accounts

Or more easily, steal and repost images on cute animal subreddits, sometimes adding white borders to the bottom right so duplicate image detection algorithms can't find it.

Thank you for sharing this view. There are a few nails in reddit's coffin and this is certainly one of them.

I used to be able to gauge real world opinions on reddit pretty accurately, i.e. be aware what was happening before the curve. That is gone now.

I can second this. Looking for a Bluetooth speaker and if I believed Reddit I am throwing money away if I’m not buying Anker. I’m sure it’s fine but it’s disproportionately represented in Reddit over other audiophile forums

I really like my Anker Bluetooth speaker, it's an old one that just keeps on working, lasted longer than Android phones. Listening to it now, every morning - the Anker love is real. ;)

If you need something cheap that lasts, Anker is your best bet. There are others that have longer lifetime, but they are from Sony, Bose or JBL and thus more expensive. My sister has the Soundcore for 2 years now.

Have had mine for several, don't use it as much as I used to because I prefer the sound signature of my phone speaker for spoken content but still love it for music. Reccomended it to my extended family and still get thrown for a loop when I see them using it all the time, like a piece of my home in their's.

This problem will only get worse as language models get better, making it cheaper to flood a forum with bot comments that look more and more like real humans. Moderators and users alike will spend far more time and resources weeding that stuff out, while it takes far fewer resources to post that stuff in large volumes.

The only way to counter that is to have some kind of account verification requiring 1 account per person. Such schemes are all either very unpopular ("Why does reddit need my passport photo!") or very ineffective ("So I just need a new IP and I can sign up for a new account? Great, I'll set up 1000 accounts")..

Reddit accounts for this already with friction like account creation dates or minimum karma. Seems to work decently

Yes, Reddit is being gamed. The question as with any system is: To what extend and how does it compare to alternative systems?

The capital that is most relevant on Reddit is status. It is very easy to have people participate in Reddit, which makes it inviting enough to start building status but it's somewhat harder to actually do. Users care about their status and about their communities and Reddit combines the two in a nifty way, that already gives provides some slid resistance against gamification.

Sure, you can infiltrate the system with any/or a lot of accounts, careful VPNing, lucky/clever reposting and also keep the guise up (you must, since your portfolio of both content and accounts is under constant review, as long as it remains visible). To get a highish ranking article on google I mostly have to write what feels like convoluted infomercials (or maybe let GPT3 do it for me). There is an industry of people being paid to do so. All it takes is one mediocre writer and some time.

To me, the former system seems very brittle and expensive to game, the later much less so, specially since the prevalence of convoluted writing for SEO purposes make the distinction between SEO bullshit and expansive content increasingly difficult: People are getting used to informercial type content on the web and so it is increasingly what they learn to expect. And we give the people what they apparently want.

I still think if you are internet savvy you detect these things almost instantly. Uncanny valley works on text too and the revulsion is just as strong.

And all it takes to destroy your best cooling for cpu now bot setup is one user saying “No it is not and here is why…” right under the comment.

A few years ago astroturf on Reddit was of low value and was easily spottable.

Now, some of it is so good, it takes longer to confirm than to find.

If there is enough value in a community people will exploit it.

That might happen if the product being pushed is awful. But if the product meets a baseline – not amazing, but perfectly cromulent – then a positive comment might not get such a rebuke.

I guess it's not the end of the world if you get astroturfed but you still get a decent enough product, but still, it's not ideal.

I don't think that's a particularly new thing. I used to be a very active reddit user, but I haven't been active on the site for 2-3 years now. But even 3+ years ago I recall plenty of (granted, anecdotal) reports of commercial astroturfing even for relatively nice subreddits.

The antidote outside of ruthlessly moderated special-interest "walled gardens" is a system no one really wants I think. It would need to avoid mechanisms that give community or interest groups powers to promote some content over others. It would need to avoid algorithms that automatically determine and recommend certain content. Other than pruning illegal contributions and obvious spam, it would need to avoid giving virtually any moderation powers to select individuals or the community. It couldn't allow paid promotion or require payment to participate as that merely enables those with greater financial means to contribute and have their content seen.

Introduce any one of these things and the whole system becomes gameable. Within these constraints it seems the outcome would be a loose graph of content tied to known individuals. It would grow amorphously over time, be largely undirected, and lacking the capability of being fully gamed, would probably avoid the attention of marketers and influencers. And probably general users too, since it wouldn't be easy to find interesting and relevant stuff and be quite boring for the average attention span.

The constraints bring to mind the early 90s web which basically had all of these properties. Outside of bulletin boards and UseNet that is. People wanted more convenience, hence search engines became the defacto way of finding entry points into these networks, which caused changes in how these networks presented and arranged themselves, point being even if we designed the perfect ungameable system, as you alluded to if any search engine or aggregator crawled and ranked its content, it would just be meta-gamed into uselessness.

Personally I've come to the conclusion we just have to accept that for the majority of online community-driven content, high SNR is here to stay, and we have to take what value we can individually as it comes. Unless we're willing to forgo conveniences like search, or relevant content recommendations, which I think for the majority of the web is a big old no.

For enthusiasts, building their own walled gardens with in-tune moderation is probably the way to go. Hacker News I think though not perfect is a good example of this, the SNR here is fairly decent compared to the broader web.

Don't forget:

0. Unlike the majority of the web, Reddit is moderated by actual humans.

I mean the example given is something about a car review. If it wasn't for reddit, it's likely the search query would be suffixed with a community name (like traditional forums), or a (to the searcher) known car review site. That said, the difference is that reddit has forums for everything, so you can expect to find a community about cars on there; if you're a noob at cars, you probably don't know which communities there are, what they're called, or if they're reliable.

I think it's just that Reddit threads the needle on openness and moderation.

Subreddits are moderated by the subreddit community. Well moderated subs attract and produce good content. Multiple subs on the same topic can exist, often a poorly moderated sub will be replaced by a better one.

My dissertation was about point #2.

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